The getaway season may be upon us but not everyone is lucky enough to get away, so to level things up a bit we'll be running blogs over the next couple of weeks on the literature of journeys: those books that will transport you, whether you're chained to your desk, sunning yourself on the sierra, or stuck in a queue at the airport.

My own choice isn't the sunniest read, but it points up the ironies of travel in a world in which one person's tourist resort is another's detention camp.

At the centre of Michelle de Kretser's fine novel, which has just won Australia's Miles Franklin award, are two characters from very different backgrounds, travelling for very different reasons. Laura is an Australian, who arrives in London to discover a country she already knows: "She looked at a bridge, and what she saw wasn't balustrade and arch but the embodiment of a sonnet. As for the monuments, they were iconic from tea towels. Then came a red-purple tree, magisterial in a park. Laura had never seen another like it and she recognised it at once – copper beeches were always turning up in novels. That was what it meant to be Australian: you came to London for the first time and discovered what you already knew."

As Laura acquires unlimited license to roam by landing a job with a guidebook publisher (the source of some trenchant comedy on the evasions of the tourist industry), Ravi is propelled by an appalling act of political carnage to leave his native Sri Lanka for the life of a refugee. In Australia, "the beaches, couched between headlands and devoid of coconut palms, didn't correspond at all to Ravi's notion of a coast".

He is patronised by do-gooders, interrogated by bureaucrats and consigned to wash dishes in an old people's home. Cut off from his home and his family, he becomes the embodiment of an old schoolteacher's belief that history is only a byproduct of geography. "It was vanity that led men to overestimate the force of history … for history was a human affair. But 'Geography is destiny. It is old. It is iron.'"

Part of de Kretser's point seems to be that the privileged travellers of the affluent West share a travel heritage, a way of looking and of describing that makes the world seem navigable and knowable: its horrors and injustices comfortably accommodated with the solipsism of the individual traveller. Returning from a stay with an impoverished Goan family, Laura resolves to send them presents to thank them and to improve their lot. She never does, because she is always distracted by more recent adventures. In the end they are just one more faraway thing that once happened to her.

There is a cost to this, as the increasingly listless Laura discovers. Ravi is also listless, though in his case not through choice but because of its absence. Others rescue him, debate his right to remain, give him jobs and then "release" him from them. Cut off from his country, his home and his family, he is also cut off from control of his own story.

Underlying the project of this uncompromising novel is the question of how such different stories can be brought into a single narrative. De Kretser's answer is that they can't, and that this is the central paradox of our globalised world. Laura and Ravi may find themselves staying in the same city, might even fleetingly make friends, but they will always be on different trajectories. The geographical accidents of their birth have set them on irreconcilable orbits which can only be halted if history and geography collide. Will that ever happen? Yes, implies de Kretser, it has and it will. The ecological event with which she ends the novel is a coup de theatre which offers an apocalyptic glimpse of the point where all journeys – and all stories – end.